Studying lemurs to understand the evolution of music in humans

Lemur songs could reveal the secret to the evolution of music in humans, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.

“Indris, known as the ‘singing lemur,’ lives in small family groups in the rainforests of Madagascar and communicates using songs similar to those of birds and humans,” the university explained in a press release last week.

The study, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, explored the different rhythms these primates use in their songs and alarm calls. It revealed that Indris uses regular intervals between sounds to create consistent rhythms or beats, just as in music.

To do this, the team of researchers based at the University of Warwick and the University of Turin studied wild lemur calls recorded in the forests of Madagascar between 2005 and 2020.

Thus the phenomenon of regular intervals in sound, called time synchrony, would be present in all indriss communications, underscoring its importance in the exchange of information between these primates.

Because alarm calls likely existed before more complex sounds like songs, synchrony may have been an ancestral rhythm from which other rhythmic patterns evolved, according to the study.

“The results shed light on the evolutionary roots of musical rhythm, demonstrating that basic elements of human music can be traced back to the oldest primate communication systems,” added study co-author Daria Valente, from the Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology. From the University of Turin.

Of the lemur's many songs, one featured three distinct vocal rhythms.

Lead researcher Chiara Di Gregorio, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, said: “This discovery classifies Endres as the animal with the greatest number of vocal rhythms in common with the human musical repertoire, and thus superior to songbirds and other mammals.”